Abstract
Philosophers and historians in Cambridge did not recognise either the relevance or the importance of Metahistory when it was published in 1973. The reasons are here explained in terms of the nature of the analytical tradition: the principled distinctiveness of analytical philosophy from (1) history, (2) speculative metaphysics, and (3) political morality. Following an analysis of ‘analysis’, Metahistory is argued to be an exercise in the recovery of paradigm cases in Strawsonian descriptive metaphysics that offers the outlines of an advanced philosophy of mind and philosophy of time.